Quotes About Friends
Quotes About Friends – the definition of a friend, according to Webster’s, is “a person who you like and enjoy being with.” But what is the true meaning of friendship? What is a true friend? What’s it mean to be a best friend?
Through the quotes below, you’ll learn different perspectives on friends, friendship, and the qualities of a friend.
Good Quotes About Friends
Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends, even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.
Thomas Aquinas
When men are friends, there is no need of justice; but when they are just, they still need friendship.
Aristotle
A principal fruit of friendship is the use and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.
Bacon
There is possible today, as ever, a generous friendship which forgets self… The miracle of friendship has been too often enacted on this dull earth of ours to suffer us to doubt either its possibility or its wondrous beauty.
Hugh Black
Most of our friendships lack the distinction of greatness because we are not ready for little acts of service.
Hugh Black
Friends are to incite one another to God’s works.
William Ellery Channing
There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.
Francis Bacon
You might like: 101 Funny Friendship Messages and Texts
Short Quotes About Friends
Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
Anita Brookner
Wherever we are, it is our friends that make our world.
Henry Drummond
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
Henry Ford
Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
Francesco Guicciardini
When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
Edgar Watson Howe
A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.
Elbert Green Hubbard
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them.
Emerson
Friendship is like a debt of honor; the moment it is talked of, it loses its real name and assumes the more ungrateful form of obligation.
Goldsmith
Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals.
Goldsmith
See Thinking of You Message Ideas for Friends
True Friends Quotes
True friendship’s laws are by this rule express’d, Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.
Homer
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it. To be capable of that high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two before there can be very one.
Emerson
Now can there be a worse disgrace than this—that I should be thought to value money more than the life of a friend?
Plato
Have friends, not for the sake of receiving, but of giving.
Joseph Roux
The services which cement friendship are reciprocal services.
William Smith
Amongst true friends, there is no fear of losing anything.
Jeremy Taylor
No friendship can excuse a sin.
Jeremy Taylor
True friends visit us in prosperity only when invited, but in adversity, they come without invitation.
Theophrastus
Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.
Tennyson
Friendship is to be purchased only by friendship. A man must have authority over others, but he can never have their heart but by giving his own.
Thomas Wilson
Friendship Quotations
He who will not to friends’ advice attend; Must not complain when they reprehend.
Saadi
There is no such flatterer as is a man’s self, and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man’s self as the liberty of a friend.
Bacon
Let flattery, however, the bond-maid of vices, be far removed from friendship, since it is not only unworthy of a friend, but of a free man.
Cicero
How was friendship possible? In mutual devotedness to the Good and True: otherwise impossible, except as armed neutrality or hollow commercial league.
A man, be the heavens ever praised, is sufficient for himself; yet were ten men, united in love, capable of being and of doing what ten thousand singly would fail in. Infinite is the help man can yield to man.
Carlyle
A real friend is one who will tell you of your faults and follies in prosperity, and assist you with his hand and heart in adversity.
Horace Smith
Inspirational Quotes About Friends
There be three sorts of friends: the first is like a torch we meet in a dark street; the second is like a candle in a lanthorn that we overtake; the third is like a link that offers itself to the stumbling passenger. The met torch is the sweet-lipped friend, which lends us a flash of compliment for the time, but quickly leaves us to our former darkness.
The over-taken lanthorn is the true friend, which, though it promises but a faint light, yet it goes along with us as far as it can to our journey’s end. The offered link is the mercenary friend, which though it be ready enough to do us service, yet that service hath a servile relation to our bounty.
Quarles
That which is most beneficial is also most excellent, and therefore those friendships must need be most perfect where the friends can be most useful.
Jeremy Taylor
Quotes About Friends: Importance of Friendship in Life
I would not live without the love of my friends.
Keats
Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain forever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attractive to every misery.
Samuel Johnson
There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less.
Bacon
Friendship? two bodies and one soul.
Joseph Roux
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
George Eliot
We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn’d, play’d, eat together:
And wheresoe’er we went like Juno’s swans,
Still, we went coupled, and inseparable.
Shakespeare
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles; have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius
Old friends are the best. King James used to call for his old shoes. They were easiest for his feet.
John Selden
Quotes About Friends: What Friendship is all about
Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
Emerson
A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows,
One should our interests and our passions be,
My friend must hate the man that injures me.
Pope
Keep thy friend under thy own life’s key.
Shakespeare
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
John xv. 13
The friendship of the pure-minded, whether in presence or absence, is not such that they will find fault with thee behind thy back, and die for thee in thy presence.
SaadiYes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship
Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!
Longfellow
Friendship like love is but a name,
Unless to one you stint the flame.
The child, whom many fathers share,
Hath seldom known a father’s care.
‘Tis thus in friendships; who depend
On many, rarely find a friend.
Gay
When two friends part, they should lock up each other’s secrets and exchange keys.
Unknown
Best Quotes on Friendship
Life is to be fortified by many friendships.
To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.
Sydney Smith
The joy that comes from a true communion of heart with another is perhaps one of the purest and greatest in the world.
Hugh Black
Stay is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.
Bronson Alcott
When I see leaves drop from their trees in the beginning of autumn, just such, think I, is the friendship of the world. Whilst the sap of maintenance lasts, my friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of my need, they leave me naked. He is a happy man that hath a true friend at his need, but he is more truly happy that hath no need of his friend.
Warwick
As the yellow gold is tried in the fire, so the faith of friendship must be seen in adversity.
Ovid
True friendship, like a star, is made brilliant by the dark night.
Unknown
That friendship only is genuine when two friends, without speaking a word to each other, can, nevertheless, find happiness in being together.
George Ebers
Promises may get friends, but it is the performance that must nurse and keep them.
Owen Feltham
More Great Quotes on Friendship
He is a friend who, in dubious circumstances, aids in deeds when deeds are necessary.
Plautus
In friendship, your heart is like a bell struck every time your friend is in trouble.
Henry Ward Beecher
Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy.
Emerson
The vital air of friendship is composed of confidence.
Joseph Roux
Who is not ready to acknowledge that friendship is the delight of youth, the pillar of age, the bloom of prosperity, the charm of solitude, the solace of adversity, the best benefactor and comforter in this vale of tears?
Unknown
However well proved a friendship may appear, there are confidences which it should not hear, and sacrifices which should not be required of it.
Joseph Roux
Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Meaning of Friendship Quotes
Keep your undrest, familiar style for strangers, but respect your friend.
Coventry Patmore
It is good discretion not to make too much of any man at first because one cannot hold out that proportion.
Bacon
When an enemy has tried every expedient in vain, he will pretend friendship, and then, by this pretext, execute designs which no enemy could have effected.
Saadi
Worldly friendship is profuse in honeyed words, passionate endearments, commendations of beauty, while true friendship speaks a simple honest language.
Francis de Sales
Ceremony and great professing renders friendship as much suspected as it does religion.
Wycherley
A friend should be like money—tried before being required, not found faulty in our need.
Plutarch
He is our friend who loves more than admires us and would aid us in our great work.
William Ellery Channing
Know this, that he that is a friend to himself, is a friend to all men.
Seneca
What it Means to Be a Friend
A friend is he who sets his heart upon us, is happy with us, and delights in us; does for us what we want, is willing and fully engaged to do all he can for us, on whom we can rely in all cases.
William Ellery Channing
There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself; we cannot force it any more than love.
Hazlitt
If thou wouldst get a friend, prove him first, and be not hasty to credit him. For some man is a friend for his own occasion, and will not abide in the day of trouble.
Ecclesiasticus
Costly followers are not to be liked; lest while a man maketh his train longer, he maketh his wings shorter.
Bacon
Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot (for more funny friend quotes)
Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant truths from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mates
A true friend will appear such in leaving us to act according to our intimate conviction,—will cherish this nobleness of sentiment, will never wish to substitute his power for our own.
William Ellery Channing
The man who prefers his dearest friend to the call of duty will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend.
W. Robertson
Give not thy friend so much power that if one day he should become a foe, thou mayst not be able to resist him.
Saadi
If you could keep your friend, approach him with a telescope, never with the microscope.
Unknown
By Liz Olson
Liz is a writer who lives in Minneapolis.
Etcetera
Other Quotes on Friendship